Okay, this strip isn't funny or anything. I just wanted to do Chris Ware-style interstitial text. Sorry.

This little two-week storyline provides a bridge to "Class Reunion," which isn't all that long either...but the storyline after that is "Doppelganger Gambit," the longest single storyline in Narbonic. I think "Mell Expelled" was inspired by my concern over how Mell managed to stay in college when her internship kept taking her away from her classes, sometimes for months on end. It ended up being pretty useful for character development and as foreshadowing for future developments involving Mell. Mell's the most two-dimensional character in the central cast, but eventually she works her way up to maybe 2.6 dimensions.

"Dollboy" is Sugar's nickname for Spike in Sheldon Mayer's classic Sugar and Spike comics. At the time, there was some debate on the messageboard over the meaning of Mell's comment, so I offered a No-Prize for the first person to identify the source. The prize was an empty envelope, just like the old Marvel No-Prizes (one of which Andrew won in the '90s for identifying a reference to The Brothers Karamozov in Spectacular Spider-Man).

DC, meanwhile, continues to sadden and disappoint me by not putting out an archive collection of Sugar and Spike. I know no one would buy it except me, but I want one anyway.

Dave's scared little "yes" is quite good, as is his fancy cigarette smoke. You can tell I was getting kind of tired of drawing cigarette smoke all the time.

Man, Mell has big hands in the second panel. At some point I decided that it was better for the characters' hands and feet to be too large than too small, what with them being cartoon characters and all, so I started to err on the side of large hands. Often this went too far.

Much, much later in the strip, Dave notes that Mell gives Artie a squeaky voice when she imitates him, too.

Still gotta love the sound effect for gender-swapping. I can't remember when I decided on this plot development, although I guess it's a logical enough way to get Dave to Mell's campus instead of Helen. Helen spent a very long period of time male during the D-Con arc, so I might as well turn Dave into a girl for a while.

This is, I believe, the last storyline to feature the gender-swap formula, although much later it's implied that certain characters continue to use it for recreational purposes. I've said this elsewhere, but I'm kind of sorry I never drew the gender-swapped characters later on, when my art was better and I could have made Dave, in particular, look cuter. Also, I never gender-swapped Artie or Mell, but Artie has his own body issues and nothing really bad ever happens to Mell.

Obviously, the best part of this strip is the collection of weird mutant lab animals in the third panel. Check out the two giant messed-up gerbils in the background! Why didn't I draw more stuff like this? Oh, right, because it's hard to keep coming up with new ones.

I also like how quickly Dave recovers from being turned into a woman at this point. And geez, Girl Dave is so much shorter than everyone else in the strip.

No, I don't remember what the Four Fours was, besides a classic mathematical puzzle, or why I wished to commemorate it in cartoon T-shirt form. I don't think Mell's various admirers are based on anyone in particular. Or maybe they are and I've just forgotten. Many details of this strip are strange and mysterious to me now. All I can say with any certainty is that Mell's skirt is really short in that first panel.

This may sound familiar, but as it turns out, "Everything's back to normal" is different enough from "things can't get any worse" to count as a distinct subtrope of Tempting Fate. (Actually, reading that page just now makes me realise how virulently many numerous variations this trope has.)

"DON'T SAY IT!": 2.

I think I'll take this brief pause to reveal the secret to putting hyperlinks in WCN comments. Turn off JavaScript, then reload the page. Unlike the fancy TinyMCE input box, the standard input box is unfiltered and allows the all-important 'a' HTML tag, as well as b, i, u, em, strong, and br (but not marquee, I'm afraid). But there's one thing you must do: never, under any circumstances, should you finish a post without closing off the bold, italic or underline tags!

Her character's flat, and needs some direction;She's cute, but made of tropes that never gelled ...In time, she'll grow to 2.6 dimensions,But right now she's fretting, 'cause she might be getting expelled!

Oh god. I've been using this trope heavily in a fight scene I've been writing with a genre-savvy chew toy mathematician in it, so as soon as I saw today's comic I sat bolt upright in my chair and said "Tropal probability! Nooo!"

And then I realized I'm not living in Narbonic, or my fanfiction, or anything. Except now that I've said that, I probably am. Bah.

Jon W. (kd7sov) says:
Interestingly, when Dave warns Helen, that is the one circumstance in which a person is allowed to use the full sentence (or one of its equivalents) without the usual Narrative Comedy consequences - as long as it's a "you shouldn't have said that" rather than "here's why you shouldn't say what you were about to". Subject to GM discretion, of course.

Adam Underfoot (unnatural20) says:
I think it also makes the panel take up more time. Obviously the smoke had to take some time to billow.

james m (ruasonid) says:
I'd just like to add that the Brothers Karamazov is awesome (albeit long and very slow for the story to actually start, but once it does, hoo boy), and I applaud Andrew for winning a no-prize regarding it.

Once again, Shaenon is being completely unfair to Dave. To be unwittingly transformed by his boss Helen is one thing. But to be quite literally emasculated by a small grinning girl, and one of his co-workers to boot, is simply taking this gender-swap thing to unscaled pinnacles of humiliation.

(If only Dave wasn't so thick-headed that the symbolic implications of these sorts of events are mostly lost on him.)Personally, I think having three storylines containing the chromosome-reversing alfalfa potion teetered this webcomic dangerously close to being typecast as 'the one with gender-swapping scientists'. Its absense from 2003-5 was a grace that let the public's perception of the comic shift to more diverse premise-simplifications, such as 'the one where gerbils turn into naked guys'.

Now how did that quote go... "This classroom is not a democracy!" Yeah, that's it.

All I'm interested in are those bizarre tubes with bubbles in them. Are they small and near, or large and far? (If the latter, I wonder about the rationality of a scientist, even a mad one, who requires ten-foot-tall beakers and test tubes.)

David Harmon (mental_mouse) says:
And after instant sex-changes, death-ray satellites, buggy teleportation, transforming robots, and mutant gerbils, we enter one of the most purely... surreal segments of the Narbonic storyline. ;-)

Elaine Corvidae (elaine_corvidae) says:
@Adam: I think there's a reference somewhere in vol. 6 about man-Artie being 6'6" or thereabouts. I seem to recall reading that when I read through the shiny new vol. earlier this week.

Mad Andy (andrew_c) says:
Is that a Domo-kun I see there? NOW WE KNOW THE TRUTH! Designed as shock troops in Helen's attempted conquest of Japan, the SDF's timely deployal of kittens averted what could of been a major catastrophe. Helen keeps this last one as a reminder of her failure, and because its so CUUTE!

What is this...?!Could it be...?!...the triumphant return of Mell's 8-Ball Jacket?! To think it has been so long!

I wouldn't describe this particular Saturday cliffhanger as surreal, Mr. Harmon. The most accurate term, I feel, would be simply 'discordant.' The most surreal part of Narbonic is, and always will be, the part where you read the latter four weeks of 'Lovelace Affair' in the wrong order because the Modern Tales archive list was all bungled up. But the time to discuss that is yet to come.

Erin McGrath (theredmenace) says:
There was a Dorothy Gambrell comic called The Four-Fours. I think they were a band, maybe? Anyway, perhaps that's the reference here...

Panel 1: Yes, Mell's skirt is short. Very, very short. You can see quite a lot of her slender, shapely legs. My my my, what a short short skirt. I don't know whether to thank Mell's fashion sense, or Shaenon's erratic drawing skills.

Panel 3: The guy obviously got the t-shirt for his sixteenth birthday ('cause he's such a square).

Panel 4: "When guns are outlawed, only sociopathic homicidal maniacs with an almost sensual love for bloodshed and dreams of world conquest will have guns. (...Heh heh heh)."

Elaine Corvidae (elaine_corvidae) says:
I always liked Dave's line in the last panel.